


Alternate

by orphan_account



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Dystopia, F/M, No OCs, multi-chapter, rated t for riots and pending apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-30
Updated: 2013-09-02
Packaged: 2017-12-25 02:15:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/947414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Oblivion Bay, Marshall Pentecost had to choose one Jaeger for Mako to rebuild: either Gipsy Danger, with severe damage but one surviving pilot, or Chrome Brutus, with no surviving pilot but less damage. </p><p>He chose Chrome Brutus.</p><p>[This is a "for the want of a nail" AU following what would change, or not change, as a result of this alternate choice. However, there are no OCs in this story.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

In Oblivion Bay, Marshall Pentecost had to choose one Jaeger for Mako to rebuild: either Gipsy Danger, with severe damage but one surviving pilot, or Chrome Brutus, with no surviving pilot but less damage.

 

He chose Chrome Brutus.

 

Two years later, in Hong Kong, Chrome Brutus disappeared into the sky in a flying kaiju’s claws. Brutus’s new pilots used their sword to kill Otachi, but after that there was nothing its pilots could do to slow their fall from the sky. Brutus just didn’t have functionalities that could counteract gravity; there hadn't been space in its chest to install a reactor, so there were no exhaust ports to vent.

 

The Jaeger’s impact on the city cracked the roof of an underground refuge. Fifty-eight people inside the refuge died. One of them was a PPDC scientist.

 

So Herc and Chuck Hansen took the last Jaeger standing, Striker Eureka, for a lone suicide run to the Breach. Striker even made it there, but, just as before, the bomb it was carrying was rejected by the Breach.

 

Striker’s detonation took out one of the kaiju that had emerged to greet it. The other two spread out from their origin point and headed for two different cities on the Pacific rim. They broke through the Anti-Kaiju Walls effortlessly.

 

For the first time since 2016, the PPDC authorized the use of nuclear bombs. The citizens of each city had one hour to evacuate.

 

*

 

In Anchorage, Raleigh Becket watched the news and wondered how the apocalypse came so slowly.

 

Half of the workers on the Wall had disappeared after the bombs were dropped last night, but it didn’t matter because nothing was being constructed any more anyway. People were breaking up parts of the wall they’d just built or trying to break into the food storage. Didn’t see the point in saving food for later when there wasn’t going to be a later.

 

 _I SPENT MY FUCKING LIFE BUILDING THIS WALL,_ someone had spray-painted in huge letters across the foot of the Wall.

 

The news reporter was talking about a huge exodus, people just grabbing their most precious things and moving inland as fast as they can. Roads blocked and riots over gas. It made Raleigh think of a book he was supposed to have read in high school; a whole family piled into one car to drive west, or something.

 

 _I’m going home_ , someone else had written on the Wall, much smaller.

 

After a while, Raleigh left the TV and walked back to the bunkhouse, where three or four guys were packing their stuff silently into their bags. Raleigh packed his own bag, which didn’t take long, and then headed for the supervisor’s office and the landline there.

 

The office was deserted—deserted fast by the look of the half-emptied filing cabinets and mess of papers. Snow was trodden all over the floor. But the phone was still there, so Raleigh took his little, beat-up notebook from his bag and opened it for the first time in years.

 

He started with Becky, just because her number was first. A Jaeger Fly. But the line was dead.

 

“Hey, Michelle?” One of the best techs he’d known. Wrong number.

 

Raleigh flipped through the water-warped pages (the book had been dropped in snow and used as a coaster a lot). Most of the numbers were dead; maybe the cell phone towers were going out. But the numbers were all pretty old too.

 

Two rings and then a pick-up. “Hey, Tendo?”

 

“ _Becket?”_

“Hey, you knew it was me?” Raleigh said.

 

“I’m a LOCCENT Officer, I’ve spent hours of my life listening to you talk.”

 

Raleigh leaned against the wall by the phone. “You’re still a LOCCENT Officer, huh?”

 

“Yeah,” Tendo said. He didn’t say anything about the bombs or Striker Eureka; Raleigh didn’t ask. “So what’s going on?”

 

“I don’t know,” Raleigh said. “I guess I just wanted to catch up. You know, before the end of the world and all.”

 

“Are you still in the USA?”

 

“Yeah, Alaska.”

 

On the other end of the line, it sounded like Tendo took a sip of coffee. “You know they thought about rebuilding Gipsy and calling you in here in Hong Kong?”

 

“No,” Raleigh said, sitting down on the edge of the desk. “No, I didn’t know that.”

 

“Yeah,” Tendo said. “Anyway, I gotta go. But good luck, Raleigh.”

 

“You too,” Raleigh said.

 

He wandered out again into the snow, wrapping his scarf around his face against the cold. People were still steadily streaming away from the bunkhouses. As he watched, a truck with the name of an office supply store on its side turned and sped away down toward the highway; it was probably full of people.

 

Some people were just running away, but the lucky ones were going home, Raleigh thought. It was like a deep impulse in people’s bones: go home. Be close to your family.

 

Through the wind, and with his bag on his shoulder, he strode toward a group of workers huddled together by the road. He didn’t have that much cash, just a ration book that probably wasn’t worth much any more, but he just needed to get to the airport.


	2. Chapter 2

 

There were no TSA agents in sight, but the inside of the small airport building was crammed with people carrying stuff or sitting with bags heaped around them. Most of the stuff wasn’t luggage, though—the people were trying to barter it for passage. Every once in a while, pilots came in and the would-be travellers clustered around them, trying to get a ride.

 

Raleigh didn’t even have junk to barter, and his ration book was next to useless now, so he cashed in the only thing he’d never cashed in.

 

In a bathroom with a rickety shower that was probably supposed to be for pilots and flight crews only, Raleigh shaved off his beard and dug through the bottom of his bag for a jacket he hadn’t worn in a long time. After years of being folded up, the leather was permanently creased, even cracking in places.

 

For half a day’s duration of sitting around, this tactic got Raleigh nothing but a barely-dodged punch to the jaw. Raleigh wasn’t sure if the guy who tried to sock him thought he was a faker or was just a Chuck Hansen blame-the-pilots type, but the ensuing fight apparently made great entertainment for everyone else waiting for a ride.

 

But, at last, the Gipsy Danger name showed its value with the arrival of a cargo pilot who’d take him for the sake of old sentimentality and as much cash as Raleigh had, which was hardly any. “I once bought a 1:100 die-cast Gipsy with you and your brother’s autographs on it,” the old lady said. “Cost me my whole paycheck. How’d you feel about signing my plane?”

 

So Raleigh took the paint can and sprayed his name across the plane’s belly, as requested. After a moment’s reflection, he drew Gipsy Danger’s logo, or his best rendition of it, there as well. There was a kind of why-the-hell-not feeling spreading around the world; sure, _I’ll write my name all over your plane. Sure, I’ll take you for a ride over the Pacific._ Why the hell not?

 

The next hour, Raleigh watched Alaska, his home, fade away under clouds. But he didn’t feel torn to see it go. All it had been to him for a long time was a beach, and rations, and the Wall.

 

He slept on boxes through most of the flight—it wasn’t like there was going to be dinner or soda in a cup with ice. There was a stop, Raleigh helped unload some cargo and loaded some other cargo, and then he went to sleep again until the pilot shook him awake in Hong Kong.

 

Turned out the pilot didn’t have any idea of how to get to the Shatterdome, but that was fine, because Raleigh didn’t either. So he picked up his bag and went off into the rain to ask for directions there. It might be across the city, but the Shatterdome had to be on the water. That was a start.

 

* 

 

Things on the ground in Hong Kong were like they had been in Alaska, but on a larger scale. A lot of the stores were shut or deserted, and there was a current of people in the streets taking their belongings out of the city however they could. But then there were the fights breaking out across the city—Raleigh stumbled across one outside a kaiju-worshippers’ church.

 

And above all this was the destruction on a higher level—the skyscrapers with chunks torn out of them, the streets blocked off because they were unsafe due to buildings’ structural damage. And, of course, the picked-clean skeleton of a new kaiju corpse lying not so far away from the bones of the kaiju who had visited the city years before.

 

Through all this, and the rain, and the night, Raleigh climbed over rubble, detoured around closed streets and riots breaking out around ration centers, and stopped once in a while to ask for directions again to make sure he was on the right track, until at last the architecture around him grew huge in scale and he saw the towering chain-link fences that surrounded every Shatterdome he’d seen.

 

There was still a guard at the security checkpoint, he saw. At least that meant the place hadn’t been completely abandoned.

 

“Excuse me,” Raleigh said, approaching the booth with his hands held in front of him. It wasn’t hard to guess that the place would be on high alert.

 

The guard in the booth frowned at him under the spotlight over the checkpoint. “What’s your business here?” she said.

 

“I’m here to see Tendo Choi,” Raleigh said, hoping that Tendo was actually still there. "My name is Raleigh Becket."

 

Ten minutes of waiting later, Tendo appeared under a large umbrella and said, “It _is_ you! Weren’t you in Anchorage yesterday?”

 

For a minute, it was like the past five years hadn't even happened. 

 

“Yeah,” Raleigh said. He was really wet and his bag was waterlogged. The leather jacket, which he just at that moment realized he was still wearing, would have been ruined either way. “I just decided I didn’t want to die sleeping next to a big concrete wall.”

 

It was the apocalypse, after all. Limited time left, not many choices either. Raleigh figured Tendo would understand. Seemed like everybody was kind of feeling the same way now.

 

Tendo just shook his head. “We have to clear it with Marshall Pentecost if you’re gonna stay,” he says. “But I don’t know why he’d say no.” Tendo gestured to the security officer. “Come on in.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, if you liked this, please comment! I love to read comments and get input.
> 
> This will be a chaptered story. I expect the next chapter to be posted soon.
> 
> The "for want of a nail" rhyme goes like this:
> 
> "For want of a nail the shoe was lost.  
> For want of a shoe the horse was lost.  
> For want of a horse the rider was lost.  
> For want of a rider the message was lost.  
> For want of a message the battle was lost.  
> For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.  
> And all for the want of a horseshoe nail."


End file.
